Communication has the tendency to break down or to be misdirected. This happens especially in public communication , as the dramatic political conflicts at the beginning of the twenty-first century prove. If not caused by armed forces, these conflicts are usually produced by a concrete media event that triggers competing interpretations and often leads to unforeseeable consequences. In our paper we claim that the origin of such conflicts lies in the phenomenon of constitutive ambiguity . Its thorough exploration opens up a fundamental understanding of communication. Though it is considered a key issue in the humanities, we do not regard constitutive ambiguity as a mistake to be pragmatically rectified. In its inevitability, constitutive ambiguity rather unlocks a field of possibilities, the use of which is apt to even provide evolutionary advantages. In our paper we will give an overview, relating three types of ambiguity to a variety of notions used in linguistics , consider the medial forms of ambiguity , and differentiate the semantic levels of ambiguity , particularly commenting on the pragmatic causes of constitutive ambiguity.
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